Chapter Sixty-Two: Even giants fall.

"Why?"

"Excuse me?" Jake asked.

Jake was standing out in the garden, allowing the sheer beauty of the flora to neutralize the blur of a day that they were in. He wasn't a kinsman, but he felt as much grief as the rest of them. He too had lost a father.

Pritchard and Harvey had returned home. They however, had returned to a fatherless home. Pritchard did not know how things had transpired. Wailing had greeted him at the door as his mother and Elizabeth cried their lungs out. Just after noon, the old man had succumbed to the illness and surrendered the ghost.

Now he was squaring up against Jake who seemed to be challenging him as the new alpha in the family, yet he was not even family. Pritchard had been minding the business' interests in Deerbron while his little brother Harvey was in Leemington. They had been sent away as per their father's design. They needed to separate, and to grow up.